WFA Over 70 Midlands League
This new League was formed at the end of 2024 and the fixtures became operational at the end of January 2025 and continued on a monthly basis until May.
The matches were all played at Rushall Olympics ground and all teams played 4 matches of 20 minutes duration each month from January to May.
The standard of football on show, for the most part, was of a very good standard, and as the season progressed it became clear that the fight for the top spot was going to be between Birmingham and Forest Vets led by former Nottingham Forest professional, Graham Collier.
Unfortunately, Birmingham lost the first match of two against Forest with only a minute or two to play when a shot from Collier took a wicked deflection and bobbled over the unfortunate but ever dependable Keith Phipps in the Birmingham goal to give them an undeserved victory.
As you can see from the Final League Table, our downfall was that we drew too many games, including the return fixture against Forest Vets, which ultimately left us with a mountain to climb. We finished a creditable 2nd behind an unbeaten Vets team. So well done to them, the table doesn’t lie, they were the best team over the season.
Roger Sutton was again our top scorer with 8 goals, and he pushed Graham Collier all the way for the Golden Boot, just falling short by 2 goals.
So well done to every member of the Birmingham squad on a particularly good first season.
WFA Over 70 Midland League Cup Winners
Following on from the WFA Over 70 League, Birmingham competed in the inaugural WFA Over 70 Midland League Cup.
Each team were required to play each other once in a league format with the two top teams playing off in the Cup Final.
The matches were 15 minutes duration straight through and as such the competition as a whole was quite a low scoring affair.
Birmingham Results were as follows:
Bham 1 Abbeymead 0
Bham 1 Hartshill 0
Bham 1 Bramcote 0
Bham 0 Rushall 1
Bham 2 Forest Vets 0
Bham 1 Nottingham Reds 1
Bham 1 Nomads (Coleshill Walkover) 0
Birmingham topped the league with16 Points, followed by Nottingham Reds with 15.
The Final, which was played Over 20 minutes, was a fiercely contested affair with neither side giving any quarter and very few goalscoring chances were created at either end. Until that was, during the final 3 or 4 minutes when Birmingham were reduced to three outfield players by the over officious referee, for offences that it seemed only he could see!!
The watching Birmingham players and manager on the sidelines thought the game was up at this point with the Reds controlling the match due to the serious numerical advantage. In these dying minutes they created three great chances to win the game but three wonderful saves by Keith Phipps, one of which was a fantastic one on one, made sure that Birmingham would draw the game and proceed to penalties to decide the winner.
The penalties were tied at 2 – 2 after Barry Huntington and Derek Greene had converted theirs for Bham with aplomb.
Then Roger Sutton stepped up and cooly made it 3 – 2.
Now it was Goalie Keith’s chance to shine. Nottingham converted but the referee decided the taker had stepped outside of the one metre area allowed, disallowed the goal, and bizarrely allowed the kicker to have another go!!
However, Bham keeper Keith, kept his cool and made another fine penalty save (one in a long line of important saves made by him over the years) and Birmingham ran out winners by 3 goals to 2.
